Kaseya 2 Upgrades Top 1,600 Customers

Yes, Kaseya's phone support lines have experienced heavy call volumes since the Kaseya 2 managed services platform launched in February 2010. But many of those calls are educational in nature, and more than 1,680 managed service providers and customers have made the move to Kaseya 2, asserts CEO Gerald Blackie.

Yes, Kaseya’s phone support lines have experienced heavy call volumes since the Kaseya 2 managed services platform launched in February 2010. But many of those calls are educational in nature, and more than 1,680 managed service providers and customers have made the move to Kaseya 2, asserts CEO Gerald Blackie.

Blackie’s comments arrive amid chatter that some MSPs within the Kaseya ecosystem are evaluating alternative options. But during a phone conversation with MSPmentor today, Blackie and Kaseya Executive VP Jim Alves delivered upbeat perspectives, and downplayed rumors about some MSP defections.

“Overall, Kaseya 2 is going brilliantly,” said Blackie. “When you have 5,000 customers and they’re used to a certain form of consumption, and when you make a major leap it’s a challenge to bring everyone along.”

So far, Kaseya 2 represents roughly 1,680 customer deployments and nearly 2 million endpoints. Still, Blackie concedes that “there will be challenges getting the much smaller MSPs converted over. They sometimes pull the trigger and do the upgrade without following all of the documentation and best practices.”

Meanwhile, Kaseya continues to host two webinars per week to help educate MSPs about the transition to K2, notes Alves. “It’s not a trivial [upgrade],” added Blackie. “If you watch the [educational] videos and the webinars, we find that for the majority of folks the upgrades have gone just fine. For anyone who takes a shortcut and skips a step, life isn’t pleasurable.”

For Big and Small MSPs Alike?

Blackie notes that the K2 platform is a “big system” because it’s designed to scale up to large, global customers, offering a “full scope” of workflow automation, new security models, new reporting services and new database requirements.

Added Blackie: “We’re not looking to leave behind small partners. If we had it over again, we’d likely wait just a little longer to make sure all the SaaS component were there for our smaller partners [from day one].”

Blackie concedes that Kaseya faced a “backlog of calls” for a couple of weeks but he says the calls didn’t involve software bugs. “It’s not that the quality of our support hasn’t been good,” said Blackie. “It’s the volume of support on the same types of [educational] inquiries.” He notes that Kaseya 2 hasn’t required many bug fixes from the development team so far. Rather, it’s all about front-line education to ensure upgrades go more smoothly.

“Our goal with K2 was broadening our appeal in the market,” added Alves. “And that’s exactly what K2 is doing for us. If you look at people who are doing managed services at the higher end of the market, they share our vision.” Reinforcing that point, Blackie said Kaseya grew about 50 percent in 2009, and expects to shift to about 70 percent revenue growth in 2010.

Meanwhile, Kaseya recommends that smaller MSPs — even existing Kaseya customers — take a look at online educational resources before pressing the K2 upgrade button. Also, Alves says existing Kaseya MSPs should sign up for a hosted K2 trial to compare their existing Kaseya 5 infrastructure to the new K2 design.

Competitive Landscape

Of course, Kaseya isn’t the only game in town. Multiple MSP software providers declared victory in Q1 2010, including upbeat statements from CEOs representing Autotask and N-able, respectively.

Meanwhile, a few MSP software providers claim to be winning business with former Kaseya MSPs. One prime example involves LabTech Software — the RMM provider that recently attracted investment money from ConnectWise Capital. “You are correct that LabTech is finding quite a few Kaseya refugees at our shores,” said Matt Nachtrab, CEO of LabTech, in an email to me. “It has been a VERY fun first month after the ConnectWise investment.” I will follow-up with Nachtrab this week for more details.

We are ex- N-Able and ex-Kaseya shop that found LabTech. And after working through some basic issues early on, have found Labtech to be Head and Shoulders way above the others. Not even close. The only thing is that I get sick to my stomach thinking about how much money we wasted on those other 2. It really is a feature packed product and they really thought of everything. The only issue for us is that we are an Autotask shop and with Connectwise’s investment, it kinda makes them an Autotask competitor. I heard that LabTech was shunned from participating at the Autotask Live Event this past week.

Blackie is full of shit and he knows it.
K2 is a buggy pile of crap. I don’t trust my own RMM tool. I dread working with it. If somebody wants 250 licenses I will gladly sell them to you. I’m moving to Labtech or Packettrap as soon as I possibly can.
education issues my ass. They are still pumping out hotfixes everyday. Not helpful hotfixes mind you, as I still cant reliably remote into client PCs.
New hardware found on a daily basis. Except no new hardware was added.
Services and scripts (system not mine) fail to run and I wake up each day to a flood of emails alerts.
I think spiceworks
vbsiedit
and logmeinfree
would be a great replacement for K2. Worthless. Run away people.

Yan: MSPmentor welcomes constructive criticism and healthy debate. But we avoid personal attacks. We also push for readers to disclose their company affiliations. Are you a Kaseya rival? MSP?

While I haven’t personally used K2, you will find a few tweets today (@kaseyacorp) indicating that Kaseya is meeting with customers and answering their questions at the Autotask Community Live conference in Miami this week.

It sounds like some MSPs here have a few concerns about K2. But those MSPs are presenting their questions and concerns in a professional manner rather than personalized attacks…
-jp

We have actually had to release some important hot fixes for Live Connect / remote control since this article was posted. Most of them were around our new practice of pre-deploying the necessary KVNC components to improve ‘first-time’ Live Connect connections, among a few other fixes.

New Hardware found — I have been here for nearly 3 years and I do not encourage the widespread use of this alert until features are added to give granular control over the type of new hardware found.

Alerts for failed scripts — again, NOT something I enable and never have. More often than not, a “failed” script/procedure is not something to be immediately alarmed about. If you’re concerned something isn’t working, run a script log report or only enable the alarm for particular agents. I personally have created a number of scripts myself that will “fail” (instead of SUCCESS THEN or SUCCESS ELSE) if certain requirements are not met. Not something I need to be alarmed about. I’ve even made the mistake of scheduling scripts/procedures on my Macintosh machines that are intended for windows and of course all of those fail but I don’t need to be instantly alarmed my “Windows Disk Cleanup” script didn’t work on my Mac 🙂

I would suggest a weekly scheduled report to summarize any possible new hardware or script failures instead of outright emails/alarms.

I will show you how to do this if you want.

I know you are frustrated but I wouldn’t reach out to you if I believed you honestly meant everything you said here.

@joe. It is personal. I have a responsibility to keep food on my and more importantly my employee’s kids table and I am sick of the platitudes. It was a bit harse but it was gentle compared to how I feel.
Am I a Rival. Um no. I’m a paying client. granted at only 250 seats I’m small. I am a small MSP / break-fix shop. 2 employees. I simply cant afford for my business to be held back like this. I’m the owner and the main tech. If it takes me 5 – 10 minutes of trying to remote into a pc and then giving up that’s bad. When it happens for months my BUSINESS IS CRIPPLED.

@Ben I got your email. thanks. Ok some of that was harse re, worthless/run-away. And K2 Scripting(when it doesnt lose half my script while saving) is better than vbsiedit.
The rest I stand behind.
As to your post. I will make the changes you suggest tonight. I still feel its important to know when hardware changes. ie RAM gets snagged out of a PC.
Anyway. this isn’t the help desk. Thanks again for the email.

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